Case Number 07165

Tarnation

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All Rise...

Hey, Judge Brett Cullum knows that guy!

The Charge

"One of the top ten films of the year!" —New York
Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, Newsday, Kansas City Star,
Time Out New York, San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Austin Chronicle, and over
fifty other publications

Opening Statement

Originally Tarnation was a home movie made for under $250, and edited
on Apple's iMovie software. And yet somehow it became a stunning debut from a
director who seemed to be channeling David Lynch, Jean Genet, Michael Moore, and
Clive Barker simultaneously. It's a movie that you feel more than you
watch. Oh yeah, and it's also a documentary made about growing up with a mother
who is mentally ill. It's a tone poem, a scathing indictment of the Texas public
health system, a tragedy, and a music video all rolled into one. One thing is
certain, you've never seen anything like Tarnation.

Facts of the Case

Jonathan Caouette probably made Tarnation as therapy. He had a story
he wanted to tell, and he used plain text coupled with music montages of home
movies and photos to exorcise some intensely personal demons that haunted him
for years. He watched his mother lose herself in a haze of misguided treatments,
like shock therapy and dangerous doses of lithium, until nothing but a fractured
shell remained of a beautiful woman. He had to deal with his own mental
problems, including a condition he refers to as "depersonalization,"
where he feels he is living in a dream world all the time. The movie chronicles
his and his mother's lives through answering machine messages, photos, old home
movies, videos shot by a teenager, clips from movies, and scenes re-enacted by
Jonathan and his friends. It is a psychedelic swirl of raging emotionalism. The
movie seethes with anger, bitterness, frustration, sexual confusion, grief,
loss, and decimation. But oddly enough, its most powerful statement is the one
it makes about hope.

The Evidence

I saw Tarnation several months ago, and the name never registered with
me when I saw the poster or the credits that open the film. I was watching the
movie unspool its narrative about Jonathan's mother, Renee. Images flashed up of
the man as a child, and eventually the movie got to his teenage years. It hit me
then. I knew this kid! We weren't close, but we used to hang out in clubs and
ran with the same group of people that revolved around the Houston underground
Club Kid scene of the late '80s. I always thought Jonathan was quiet and demure.
He would sit in a corner smoking, sometimes in a black wig and other times
sporting some naturally long hair that eventually was dyed pitch black. We hung
out with people who went by nicknames like "Bam-Bam,"
"Spooky," "Holly Wood," "Treasure," and
"God." I sometimes went by "Domino," because my girlfriend
used to tease me about wearing black and white obsessively. We all didn't know
much about each other, except what was revealed during carefully calculated
performances in the clubs. This was someone whom I had only seen in a world
overflowing with artifice. Watching the film was like seeing Jonathan naked in a
way that made me uncomfortable. His pained soul was seeping out of the
frame.

It's an amazing film. Tarnation is likely to be the most personal
thing you will ever see. Where it succeeds is putting you inside someone else's
head for an hour and a half. It's like having your mind taken over by someone
else's stream of thoughts, and it trumps the trippiest of David Lynch's works
for being visceral and feral. Documentary films rarely have a sense of tension
or dramatic flare, but Jonathan has accidentally stumbled upon a way to
communicate the emotions behind the events to an audience. He has always wanted
to make it big as an actor, but the truth is this is the part he was destined to
play. No character, no facade, just himself pouring out what it's like for
somebody searching for some resolution to a life of upsets and hard times. It
shows two very moving things: what it's like to have a mother that is not there,
and what it's like growing up worried that you will also fall victim to her
mental disease. His mother, Renee, is the figure that looms largest over the
entire film. Her story is the one that will transfix viewers immediately. It's a
son's Valentine to a mom.

What the film ultimately achieves is an innovation. Documentaries have been
around since the dawn of filmmaking, but here is the first one the MTV
generation can call its own. Caouette is using styles that incorporate all the
visual flare of music videos, and his use of text and images married with
well-chosen music feels revolutionary. Tarnation is like seeing film
developing a new language, and that is what makes it so exciting. More than just
an extension of the current reality phase, it moves beyond simple documentation
into emotional narrative. It opens up possibilities for other filmmakers to
tackle personal subjects. Is Tarnation the floodgate that will usher in a
whole new wave of amateur auteurs delving into the personal in radical ways?
It's a perfect expression of how technology like Apple's iMovie software is
going to force film to evolve. The larger question that looms over the movie is:
how many people will start making movies of their lives?

DVD is the best way to see Tarnation. It was made on a computer
screen, and the fullscreen transfer is the correct aspect ratio. I think the
film works better in your own home than it does in the dark with a lot of
strangers. It's easier to take that way. Also, the surround sound mix is
amazingly well done. Don't let the initial budget fool you—they spent a
fortune on music licensing and revamping the soundtrack with sound engineers
from Skywalker Sound to deliver the final mix. Some of the film's more
impressive visual transitions to split screen were also achieved by a team of
professionals as well. Whatever state Tarnation was in before Gus Van
Sant (My Own Private Idaho) and
John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) became involved, it's
certainly been polished for final release.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

Something is troubling about the extras on Tarnation. First up is the
curious choice to include a commentary. The film explains itself all too well
with its rolling type and music selections, so it was odd hearing the creator
talk about the process of making it. He admits far too much. Jonathan reveals
the initial cut of Tarnation was much longer—four hours by some
accounts, and two hours and forty minutes by others. It used to include several
fictional subplots, and staged dramatic scenes that John Cameron Mitchell and
Gus Van Sant advised be cut for the film's proper release. Another troubling
aspect is Jonathan admits to some artistic licenses he took with the story. You
have to remember the man is an actor, and he out-and-out lies in more than a
couple of spots in the story to make it more dramatic. I won't name every
example, but he refers to Visions (a club in Houston) and says he had to sneak
in dressed as a girl because he was underage. In truth, the club was for
teenagers; he's embellishing to make it more dramatic. Even more troubling, he
lies outright about a reunion with his father that happened much earlier than
what the film states. He admits some of these untruths in the commentary. It
would have been wise to avoid that. There are some unedited sequences from
Jonathan's collection of video archives. The raw footage reveals just how
skillfully the final cut was manipulated to make them seem more dramatic as
well. Two bonus tracks with music and more footage seem superfluous and hardly
support the film. The extras seem to undermine some of the good will the movie
itself built up. Mark the history books, because for the first time I'm going to
say "less would have been more" in the extras department.

Closing Statement

This is easily one of the best movies of last year. It was criminally ignored
at major award shows, and got a very minimal release throughout the country.
It's definitely something you should check out. Though the topic of mental
illness and watching footage of Jonathan's mother is hard, gritty stuff,
ultimately the ending is one of unrelenting hope. In the end, Tarnation
is a simple love story about two lost people who find each other again. What
makes it unique is it packs more power than any major release from last year
without a single star appearing in it. In this age when Hollywood seems to be
endlessly recycling what worked in the past, it's nice to see a film that looks
to real life for the future of cinema.

The Verdict

Tarnation, Jonathan, and his mother are all to be lauded. I hope this
marks the beginning of a great career. But even if Caouette doesn't deliver
another film as powerful as this one, he's got something to be proud
of—his own life on the silver screen.